given what I said about homonymy of original combinations being rare (1% or so),why not just encourage/require authors to specify the original combination ofany subsequent combination that they use? This would seem to solve the problem...
it could be done quite simply, as in this imaginary example: Homo troglodytes(Blumenbach, 1775; Pan)
Stephen

________________________________
From: Roderic Page <r.p...@bio.gla.ac.uk>
To: David Campbell <pleu...@gmail.com>
Cc: taxacom <taxa...@mailman.nhm.ku.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, 19 June 2012 10:51 AM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Does the species name have to change when it moves genus?

Dear David,

I'm not arguing we turn back the clock and rename Triceratops horridus. Let'sfreeze it and if someone thinks it belongs someplace else in the tree let'salways call it "Triceratops horridus" ( realise that this may well happen anywaygiven that T. horridus is the type specieshttp://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511608377.021 , but I hope you see my point).

It also seems to me that a number of people on this list think thatnon-specialists are only going to be interested in a few taxa, say those whichhave common names. Really? We have genomics databases with hundreds of thousandsof species, specimen databases with millions of species, and people are usingthese to tackle all sorts of questions, and taxonomic names (with the variationsin spelling, synonyms, etc.) don't make it easy to work with this data.

Lastly, phylocode define names such that they will always fit on a tree, thename itself doesn't change even if the phylogeny does (the scope of what isincluded in the name may change). In contrast, by convention bionomials dochange when the classification changes, which builds instability into the names.

I've zero expectation that I'm going to convince anyone that this is a sensibleidea, but it seems a good time to question "tradition."

Regards

Rod

On 18 Jun 2012, at 23:17, David Campbell wrote:

Requiring that the original name be a non-homonym would help with
relatively few cases in my experience. Usually you have to track down
the invalid homonyms anyway to confirm which name was meant in an
existing identification. [Hint in light of the fauna I was just
working on-if you name a new taxon in a very long established and
diverse genus, avoid common Latin descriptors.]

Tradition is a significant factor, given that over 250 years of
literature needs to be taken into account. If a genus-species
combination were regarded as fixed, then the question would be "which
combination?" Probably the majority of species are not assigned to
their original genus; many of these recombinations are
well-established.

This gets into the Phylocode-ish question of to what extent and in
what manner should the taxon name reflect the phylogeny.

Then there's the question of, if a generic and specific epithet pair
becomes fixed, how do you indicate revised classifications?

Some original combinations are highly misleading, through homonymy,
misidentification, or unduly broad early genus concepts. Changing
Triceratops horridus back to Bison horridus would be rather unhelpful,
for example.

In fact, the standardized common names being proposed for a number of
taxa function as unchanging epithets. They are generally being
developed for the taxa most likely to get attention from
non-specialists, whereas specialists are likely to recognize
suspiciously similar epithets in related taxa.

Including the author and date generally helps, although there are the
unhelpful authors who either use the same epithet in closely related
genera, have a memory lapse and create an outright homonym, or reuse
common descriptors for multiple infraspecific forms within a genus.

---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine
College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK